1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to racks and enclosures, and more particularly to racks and enclosures used to house data processing, networking and telecommunications equipment.
2. Discussion of Related Art
Equipment enclosures or racks for housing electronic equipment, such as data processing, networking and telecommunications equipment have been used for many years. Such racks are used to contain and to arrange the equipment in small wiring closets as well as equipment rooms and large data centers. In certain embodiments, an equipment storage rack can be an open configuration and can be housed within a rack enclosure, although the enclosure may be included when referring to a rack.
Over the years, a number of different standards have been developed to enable equipment manufacturers to design rack mountable equipment that can be mounted in standard racks manufactured by different manufacturers. A standard rack typically includes front mounting rails to which multiple units of electronic equipment, such as servers and CPUs, are mounted and stacked vertically within the rack. An exemplary industry-standard rack is approximately six to six-and-a-half feet high, by about twenty-four inches wide, and about forty inches deep. Such a rack is commonly referred to as a “nineteen inch” rack, as defined by the Electronics Industries Association's EIA-310-D standard.
Management systems have been developed to manage the power distribution and cooling systems of data centers containing racks. One such management system is known as the InfraStruXure™ (“ISX”) manager offered by American Power Conversion Corporation of West Kingston, R.I., the assignee of the present invention, which is particularly designed to control the operation of large data centers.